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May 2014

05/31/2014

This is the real question I end up with at this point, so enlighten me.

Today there's an article in the New York Times about a Fox News journalist subpoened over refusal to reveal a source about a leaked secret indictment.

This is like the story of James Risen of the New York Times.

The angle these stories always take is, "Oh, the horror, the Obama Administration is the most punitive to leakers, is Obama a horrible chill on press freedom."

I see it differently. I think the Community-Organizer-in-Chief's problem comes to this; those to the radical left of him - and he's no radical slouch since his DSA days -- have a weakened White House that they can essentially "hack moar".

He's created a sense of opportunism for the hard left to take advantage of him and guilt-trip in ways a Bush or a Reagan could have never been spooked.

The number of leaks and then his desire to prosecute them are therefore functions of weakness, not strength. He leaks more because not only is he weaker; he has encouraged anti-Israel pro-Iranian sentiment in certain US government factions, and anti-war-on-terror ideologues in general, and that has created trouble -- they leak because they feel impunity *from Obama* first of all.

Then there's this piece of it -- I don't think James Risen should endlessly get to report on things that degrade our ability to fight the Iranians or the Fox News guy should get to leak an operation against Somali based terrorists that affect our ability to fight Al Shabab.

Why do they feel a sense of entitlement to do this? Either they want to tip off terrorists or they want to nudge Obama into doing more against them, depending on their agenda.

I'd have to study these stories more carefully to see what's up and whether there is some "redeeming feature" that would warrant these stories being in the domain of "the public's right to know." That same public elected a government that it mandates to keep secrets of national security, too, you know.

But here's the thing. Is the problem really originating in the sealed indictments?

I could understand if you could make a compelling case that the indictments have to be sealed so that the suspects and their accomplices aren't tipped off.

But at what point are you encouraging ongoing crime and terrorism and espionage by doing that, and not deterring it with more public presidential declarations explaining the difference between right and wrong?

I want to have that discussion.

For example, I find it ABSOLUTELY APPALLING that we have no public indictments of WikiLeaks operatives from Assange on down to Snowden for his epic NSA hack.

Why?

I can't imagine what the interest is there that would be about not tipping off suspects. Subpoenas already tipped them off. National security letters already tipped them off.

Now we need to be let in on the secret and be part of creating a civic deterrent to espionage and undermining national security. Seriously.

John Schindler, the former NSA officer, a Russia expert and now former professor at the Naval Academy, asks WHEN Edward Snowden came over to the Russians. THAT he is on the Russians' side now is obvious not only to anyone who is in the intelligence community, but anyone who has had to deal with Russia for years who is honest about the nature of the Kremlin's regime and not constrained by ideological blinders.

Glenn Greenwald and the other Snowdenista enablers always try to deflect this question by asking for "proof" -- one suspects that even if Snowden were to get on heavily pre-packaged Russian state TV, which he was happy to use to pitch his softball question to Putin, and even hold up a GRU identification card, and confess that he'd been recruited by the Russkies back at an anime convention in Ft. Meade when he was 20, no one would believe him.

Really, there is no proof that Greenwald would ever accept, so let's not worry about what he thinks because he's not the one you need to convince. It's journalists who are willing to be a bit more critical of Snowden than he is -- and there are more of them now as not only Business Insider and Newsweek have reported critically on Ed, but Daily Beast and Venture Beat.

To me, the question to study is HOW, because THAT is not at issue for me -- and those for whom it is are not easily pursuaded -- and WHEN is not something I can discover.

If you focus on the HOW and keep digging eventually the story will break -- that's my conviction. But it's the piece of the story journalists are most reluctant to tackle because they feel it will ding them or some civil right they cherish by casting a spotlight on radical groups whose civil rights to speech and association they want to protect. I agree with none other than Slate's Michael Kinsley that journalism is not an endlessly capacious and elastic concept that includes seriously undermining national security in a liberal democratic state with impunity. I think it's fine to ask that a line be drawn between civil rights and crime, you know, as it was done with Occupy, where First Amendment protected speech was not elasticized to include months on end of overnight urban camping in a city park, spawning rapists, drug addicts and rats.

Schindler must know that by explaining that Snowden just can't walk in to a Russian consulate and be accepted as an agent on the spot, that in a way he is pouring water on the mills of the argumentation of lawyers Greenwald and the ACLU's Ben Wizner that he was never an agent (recruited long before Hong Kong). For Schindler, that set of facts only means you have to look harder at Ed's past, but for the Snowdenistas, it means they've been proven right. That's why examining the HOW becomes really important.

It's my thesis, spelled out in my book Privacy for Me and Not for Thee, that WikiLeaks, Tor and Chaos Computer Club anarchists and hackers recruited Snowden so the Russians didn't have to.

Maybe at one time, in the Soviet era, the Russians were really strict about coalition work -- they wanted to fully control all the popular fronts or radical movements they worked with, if not create them out right themselves and run them.

Today, with budget cuts, confusing and debilitating in-fighting among Russian agencies, the receding of the Russian empire borders even though they are encroaching again right now in Crimea, Russian spies are more willing to do coalition work with anarchists or jihadists because in part, they can set a pot to boil and then let it boil over and cause mayhem without them and still gain overall by degrading the West.

WikiLeaks goes way back in their acceptance of Moscow as their vector, not only the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" concept -- they hate America and specifically the US and work aggressively against it by all available means. It's also their True North ideologically, whether you chose communism in the 1970s, as the Chaos Computer Club recruits did, or fascism today, as the later WikiLeaks collaborators did in selecting a creep like Israel Shamir to work with and continuing to avoid any authentic criticism of Putin.

WikiLeaks thinks they are being independent but opportunistic in collaborating with the Kremlin; the Kremlin is happy to let them go on feeding that delusion.

The WikiLeaks attempts to frustrate US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with leakages that hurt America and helped Russian interests didn't accomplish much, in part because they dumped the raw materials online and few people bothered to make sense of them.

So they were more strategic when they came to Cablegate in 2010, picking and choosing and tying cables to world events for maximum damage, and working with journalists -- well, up to a point, they ended up with quarelling with nearly all of them. Poitras remains in good relations with them -- but she's really an activist, not a journalist, although she does blackmail mainstream media into putting her by-line along with mainstream journalists -- in order to gain access to the Snowden documents.

At this point, Greenwald has distanced if not cut his ties to WikiLeaks, as the recent flap over the "fifth country" illustrated, although the issue of the Tor revelations already clinched it. Greenwald was done with Jacob Appelbaum, WikiLeaks representative in the US, and Assange's stand-in at the hackers' HOPE conference in 2011, after that. He didn't even give him a mention in his book, reducing him to the term "tech helper" -- although he's likely the guy who sent him the FEDEX package per Poitras' instructions. [Update: Actually, it turned out that it was not Appelbaum, but Greenwald's tech guru at Intercept now, Micah Lee who is willing to take elaborate credit for this.]

WikiLeaks responded by committing the ultimate shun of modern times -- they unfollowed Greenwald on Twitter.

That WikiLeaks and Tor go together requires no special guessing, because not only is Appelbaum in both; so is Laura Poitras, and other characters like Runa Sandvik of Tor have never opposed WikiLeaks. James Ball, both at WikiLeaks and the Guardian, can play both networks.

Whether WikiLeaks used its considerable network of anarcho-hackers and crypto kids to reach Ed in the US, Japan, or India (and then later set up his operation in Russia) can be explored -- in my book I follow the travels of both the WikiLeaks and Tor characters who go to all those countries when Ed is there. Ed has been to lots of places, including the UK, where Sarah Harrison was, and Bosnia, where anybody could be.

But to be more specific:

1. In 2012 or even earlier, WikiLeaks establishes a presence in Moscow where they can obtain visas for foreigners, funding, cars, permits of various sorts, etc. through Russkiy Reporter, a Russian news site close to the government whose reporter, Dmitry Velikovsky has visited Assange while under house arrest and who has maintained close ties with him.

The media company that owns Russkiy Reporter is Ekspert or Expert. It is owned by an oligarch loyalt to Putin, Oleg Deripaska. Shamir has written for Pravda, Zavtra (ultranationalist paper), Izvestiya, and Komsomolskaya Pravda, which are all pro-government. He's also a regular contributor to Counterpunch.

The ostensible purpose of Mediastan was to discredit the US and any independent media in Central Asia that appear to have US help or which refuse to report the WikiLeaks cables for their country. But that despicable operation itself is, in my view, a cover for the setting up of the Snowden Operation, to get a visa and legend for Sarah Harrison, to get apartments, etc. needed for operations, and make it appear as if Snowden is a WikiLeaks freelance project, not scripted at the GRU/SVR/FSB.

2. Runa Sandvik, then at Tor Project, now -- to gain that critical distance -- just moved to Center for Democracy and Technology, was first beamed into a panel in Moscow in November 2012 with Russian intelligence expert Andrei Soldatov at the Sakharov Center, but obviously her connections go back before that.

3. Greenwald ostensibly hears from Snowden the first time on December 1, 2012, according to his book, but he's told the story six different ways, one of which might have made that date as early as November 2012. Poitras also hears from Snowden in December 2012 or earlier, not January as she claims -- that story has also been changed or questions about it dodged.

4. Runa Sandvik travels deliberately to Honolulu, ostensibly "on vaction" and attends a Crypto Party organized by Cincinnatus, who is none other than Snowden, on December 11, 2012. She finds out that he runs Tor nodes (servers through which Tor traffic can run) -- either right at the NSA or off campus in his own home, it's not clear. He tells her that he is recruiting other NSA agents (!) to run Tor nodes and that he needs a pack of Tor stickers as "incentive" to get them to do this. She mails him the pack of stickers later, she says.

5. Greenwald makes more serious contact with Snowden in March or April 2013, as he once admitted, and later changed his story about, and gets public keys with Poitras and Appelbaum and possibly one other NSA contractor to contact Snowden. When I later ask questions on an ACLU Facebook page of that NSA contractor what he was up to, the ACLU deletes the entire conversation.

6. Appelbaum claims he first begin communicating with Snowden in May to vet and interview him with Poitras, but more than likely he's been in touch long before that because he has long helped Poitras with comms. One possibility for direct contact for either or both or them or their cutaway friends is at the Spring Break of Code in late March-early April when Snowden could have plausible attended right before he flew to Ft. Meade for training.

These earlier contacts matter, because this is BEFORE Snowden steals some of his make documents (he began stealing in April 2012, we're told, and maybe earlier but some items date later like the Verizon court case documents would have to be stolen in April 2013).

9. By this time, Snowden has met with Russian diplomats and Russian enablers of some sort locally (journalists, human rights activists, lawyers of some kind) and of course Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks arrives in mid-June, just in case you forgot that it is WikiLeaks, not Glenn Greenwald running this op.

10. They leave for Moscow June 23, and supposedly stay in Sheremeytovo airport in a broom closet for 6 weeks, but Kommersant reports that they were picked up by diplomats from Ecuador, which has provided refuge to Assange in their embassy in London, and Venezuela. He is granted one year asylum in Russia. Harrison stays with him until Revolution Day November 7, 2013, comrades, and then goes to Germany as "she can't go home again."

11. Right before that, they are visited in Moscow by German leftists including the lawyer for the Baader Meinhof gang AKA Red Army faction, himself once jailed along with them. Yes, there are many fingerprints of the KGB's long-time coalition partners in this story, and German KGB enablers, including Putin, who served in East Germany when he worked for the KGB.

12. Greenwald and Appelbaum have an open falling out on Twitter over WikiLeaks' and Tor's challenge to Greenwald that he is sitting on Snowden revelations regarding the NSA's efforts to crack Tor. In fact, Greenwald is in the process of replacing Appelbaum temporarily with Bruce Schneir as his tech advisor, vetting the material and getting the Guardian to publish it. Greenwald leaves the Guardian over the same kind of accusations ultimately, because he now has Pierre Omidyar to fund him, but he never forgets being dissed publicly by Appelbaum.

13. Greenwald's book is scheduled to come out in April 2014, but is delayed until May. Meanwhile in April, some chapters are published and some people get copies of it. The fact that Snowden used the name Cincinnatus gets out, likely without the realization that it hooks up to the Crypto Party in Honolulu in December 2012 attended by Runa and in which Electronic Frontier Foundation is also referenced.

14. In April 2014, Runa Sandvik goes to Moscow. Fortuitously, she tears the RFID off her Norwegian passport. She meets with Soldatov and human rights activists, but that's the cover, although by this time, Soldatov may be a witting facilitator. She likely meets with Snowden and discusses how they are going to deal with the fact that Greenwald's book outs not only Cincinnatus, but Sandvik, i.e. Tor. There may have been an effort to get this scrubbed from the Internet in time, but due to mirror sites and such, it couldn't be done. Greenwald may have leaked this to get back at Tor and WikiLeaks (Appelbaum) for calling him a presstitute when he supposedly "sat on" the Tor revelations and they didn't appear right away in the Guardian.

15. While in Moscow, in April 2014 Runa gives some press interview, but declines to answer slon.ru directly whether Snowden still runs those Tor nodes or works for Tor; she says they don't discriminate and lots of people contribute (!).

16. In May 2014, Wired publishes a sanitized and reworked story of Runa Sandvik's role in the Crypto Party by Kevin Poulsen that can accentuate Runa's innocence. It never mentions that she went to Moscow the month before, although Runa was careful to leave a very public trail of her trip to dispel any sense of secrecy. Even so, you can tweet about trips and still have secret meetings, i.e. with Snowden.

17. In May 2014, WikiLeaks also orchestrates the "outing of the fifth country as Afghanistan" to try to embarrass Greenwald, and also outs the role of Jared Cohen supposedly in getting telecom towers moved to US army bases where supposedly they are then opened up to the NSA to monitor everybody's conversations.

18. Soldatov (who hosted Runa twice, once via Skype and once in person in Moscow), publishes a critical review of Greenwald's book, in which he slams Edward Lucas, reiterates that he thinks NSA revelations of spying on people is a good thing, but says Greenwald isn't telling us anything about Snowden's Moscow adventures in his book. The purpose appears to be to slam Greenwald on behalf of, in concert with WikiLeaks, while raising some questions about Snowden to appear plausible. Or perhaps the crypto-crypto kids are done with Snowden now, too.

Update:

2. Soldatov has written this sarcastic tweet, which I take to mean he does not wish to be called a WikiLeaks agent or a Russian agent and that heaven forfend, even to raise these questions is to engage in "conspiracy theory."

I've not called him either, of course, but since he seems to take objection to the "on behalf of" here, I'll cross that out, but I stand by "in concert with" - because it is. WikiLeaks is engaged in an avid campaign now to discredit Greenwald but preserve the value of Snowden. Soldatov thinks Snowden is just dandy for challenging Greenwald and starting the Internet debate in Russia. I disagree strenuously.

Soldatov has been a critic of WikiLeaks, i.e. here back in 2010, but in doing so, he's also conveyed his critique of Western journalism as "in a crisis" and his belief that American military reporting that Iran supplies Iraqi insurgents can't be trusted.

19. A privacy and security conference convened in Sweden demonstratively does not invite Assange, Appelbaum, Snowden or other Snowdenista, and they squeal about blacklisting. Carl Bildt is involved. Europeans are letting it be known that they will oppose the NSA, but not by joining ranks with the radicals of WikiLeaks and Tor.

20. Runa publishes in Forbes on May 28 a highly-viewed story about the sudden shut-down of TrueCrypt and warnings that it is no longer secure -- a story that was already racing across various nerd fora and social media -- ensuring maximum panic mode. TrueCrypt was Snowden's favourite program inside Tails, which he used on a USB to ensure that his encryption wouldn't be hacked by the NSA, or so he thought. He is famous for claiming:

Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.

If Greenwald leaked the Cincinnatus name so that Runa could be found by Cryptome or anyone, then he may be willing to do more to throw Tor and WikiLeaks under the bus. He may find it convenient even to let them appear to have wholesale recruited and deployed Snowden even with the Russians -- because it will no longer matter.

He may feel that if the outing of the Russian connection -- so blatant and so staring at us all this year anyway -- is the price he pays for discrediting WikiLeaks, so be it. He will have sequestered himself behind the wall of journalist privileges, and he can say "even if" WikiLeaks and the Russians worked to recruit and deploy Ed, so what? The main point is that revelations were made, and reforms, even if weak are being made, and it's all good.

In other words, I think the Russian role and the exploitation/collaboration with WikiLeaks will just keep seeping out like blood from a bandage, and soon it will be the least-kept secret and something "everyone knows" so that "everyone" doesn't care about it. Snowdenista resources will work overtime to make the point that NBC's star source of the year can't be wrong, and even if he worked with the Russians, so what, that's what it took. And besides, the Russians aren't so bad anyway.

We're all waiting for some big Philip Agee sort of confession or revelation on this story or thinking it's going to be a long-term but ultimately inevitable process like Alger Hiss. But in our modern times, everything is always online and always leaked and always visible, so it's more about the attention economy and good search capacity.

Eventually, it's all on Cryptome or WikiLeaks or even Twitter, and people put it together, but by then, it's been saturated into the background to denude it of its revelatory power.

Time and again, Greenwald and others have already set up this proposition: even if it turns out Snowden is a Russian agent now, it doesn't matter, he did a good deed. If it turns out that he was a Russian agent before, well, that reduces some of his support, but for many people, still doesn't undo the fact that he did a good deed. Many will continue to see Russia in the same "progressive" light that they saw the Soviet Union, despite its support for mass murder.

Here's the thing: This is not a game that will be won in the end merely by exposing Snowden as a Russian agent. Those who know such things knew that already, and those who aren't ideologically twisted get it soon enough.

It's rather a game of exposing the whole apparatus -- WikiLeaks, Tor, Foundation for Freedom of the Press, Electronic Frontier Foundation -- in their higher meta game in which Snowden is only one operation in the war for maximum encryption, a war that is only to their advantage, and not to that of liberal democracies -- and ultimately to Russia's advantage.

The arms war in encryption they have unleashed and continue to unleash through many rounds may be deterred by things like the feds shutting down Lavabits -- Ed's email, which he used under his own name and"Cincinnatus" -- and the shutting down of TrueCrypt -- one of the encryption programs he relied on -- possibly with a National Security Letter. Let's hope! Maybe Tor will be next (and it will be next).

But until society gets a grip on the war of encryption itself and what it means, we will see many more rounds of this.

05/30/2014

I started jotting notes to make a timeline matching Snowden leaks with world events and their advantage to Russia -- but I just didn't have the time to do the research. This job should be done. There are now various lists and timelines of Snowden's leaked documents out there you can use. I thought I'd post these notes now to get people thinking along these lines.

John Schindler debated the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer (who else!) on this issue of "damage" tonight. The Snowdenistas claim there is no damage. Schindler, formerly of the NSA, quite rightly explains that the NSA is not going to stand up and paint a fresh target on his back and give the enemy MORE information about how badly hurt and vulnerable we are. Duh.

I've been making that point for years about Cablegate. How many millions of times have I heard that there isn't "proof" that there was any harm to individuals done by Cablegate. I would make the point -- no, my colleagues hurt by this will not be standing up and painting a target on their backs so you can hit them AGAIN. I noticed how one man, an Azeri democracy activist, got absolutely SAVAGED by the Snowdenistas, accusing him of the WORST things merely becuase he was mentioned in cables, harassed, and claimed asylum here on that basis. Shame on them! These cases are now CLASSFIED. I know more -- and no, I'm not going to tell you -- because, as I just said, why paint targets on people and their families?!

Alexa O'Brien, the Manning scribe and fangirl, is especially horrible on this point. Eli Lake debated her once on this. But really, the point has to be burned in: these unethical people who have stolen files are hardly the ones to define damage for us.

Jameel obviously anticipated that answer re: damage and was ready for the next round. He says, "Oh, but even in classified settings, briefed persons don't learn about damage."

Schindler says that's patently false, but doesn't bite on the provocation -- which is what this is. It's merely another lawyerly way of posing the same question.

What is Schindler supposed to say? "I didn't tell you that secret thing you wanted directly the first time, now you're going to try another way and sure, now I'll tell you, since you asked a different way."

Because obviously, to reveal that you were given information on damages to national security in a classified briefing in Congress is to reveal the classified information -- derp.

What, he thinks it's a routine matter to come out of a classified briefing in Congress and say, "Oh, here's what we were in fact told in this secret briefing."

Dopes.

Why is this so hard? Why do they keep getting away with this nonsensical, indefensible bullshit?!

Of course there's damage, as any idiot can see looking at relations with Europe. Germany, for starters. And um, no, it's not about the countries being "mad," it's about tendentious exposure of practices in a deliberately provocative light with intent to harm. And that working.

In fact, all we know is that Jacob Appelbaum says he had Merkel's phone in a list in a document from Snowden -- we don't know if in fact that proves the NSA did bug her phone -- and we don't know what she said. Sure, that got her mad, but she should compare and contrast her situation to that of Victoria Nuland of the State Department, bugged by the Russians, the content of whose conversation got leaked by Russian intelligence on YouTube. Life is about choices, America is better than the Russian. Want to have a third way? Ok, but appreciate which is better, America or Russia.

Who can dispute that German-US relations are worse and tattered maybe beyond repair? And yet it was absolutely right to spy on them and not put them in five eyes -- some of them are too chummy with Putin. They can't have that third way they seek that involves in fact greater chumminess with the Kremlin than us.

Let's see now. Gates revealed that the French were doing bad things, grabbing commercial data as bad as the Chinese.

So he revealed that in a bid to deter it. Good!

The Chinese do bad things, hacking into our business, media, government to steal secrets and economic data.

We then hack back to try to deter them and get a jump on them. Obviously, we have no need of their economic data except in so far as we need to see what they're stealing for us.

So Snowden reveals our techniques for doing that. Great! That's called being a traitor.

Nope, I'm not seeing any moral equivalence here.

I'm seeing that Ed is a felon.

And Masnick is profoundly ethically challenged, as per usual.

What I think has to be done in these debates to get to the third round with Jameel is immediately challenge him on the Jamshid Muhtorov case. He thinks this is a terrible case; it's actually a good case. So go right to the mat with him on that because he will not look good justifying turning the other way when a man is caught chatting jihad with jihadists and gets them money and equipment -- especially when the one thing the Snowdenistas keep doing (Saul Alinsky style) is to keep pretending that despite all the snooping, the NSA/FBI/Boston police couldn't predict and stop the Tsarnaevs.

BTW, the Tsarnaev case has the same root problem as the Snowden case: the Russians.

Second, we need to shift this debate around. The Snowdenistas keep asking for proof of damage to the country. But we need to say we need proof of damage to Americans. They don't have any. A year into it, and they have nothing -- oh, except this threat from Greenwald to name victims' names.

In any event, I'm not in the classified loop, and I actually don't have a competent way of telling what "damage" is to a country unilaterally or bilaterally, i.e. which missiles were described where or which methods of tapping Al Qaeda got described, etc. but I can use common sense.

Where have our relations but deliberately harmed so that we are undermined in our foreign policy? That's common sense.

More intricately, where has Putin succeeded in gaining propaganda and political advantage while the world was preoccupied with Snowden leaks?

So, here are a few samples of what such a chart would look like, below.

Leak: Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

Response: "We were not aware of, nor would we condone, this reported activity," said a [Yahoo] spokeswoman. "This report, if true, represents a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy that is completely unacceptable, and we strongly call on the world's governments to reform surveillance law consistent with the principles we outlined in December."

[NSA] "A key part of the protections that apply to both US persons and citizens of other countries is the mandate that information be in support of a valid foreign intelligence requirement, and comply with US Attorney General-approved procedures to protect privacy rights. Those procedures govern the acquisition, use, and retention of information about US persons."

Damage: By picking an emotional and sensitive issue -- a high percentage of the use cases for Yahoo webcam is related to sex -- this revelation could ensure maximum shock and anger value; also by invoking 1.8 million affected, it could add to the narrative of "massive surveillance". Yahoo, struggling with email and group woes but on an acquisition spree, was angered but business did not seem to suffer.

Leak: The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

Response: In a statement, Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, declined to comment on “specific alleged intelligence activities.” Speaking generally, she said that “new or emerging threats” are “often hidden within the large and complex system of modern global communications, and the United States must consequently collect signals intelligence in bulk in certain circumstances in order to identify these threats.”

Authors: Bart Gellman and Ashkan Soltani

Russian Events: President Putin's speech in the Kremlin about the forcible annexation of the Crimea.

A lot of people looking at it took it at face value, saw him as merely asking a know-it-all-question from an instructor about his training, and saw it as merely as exposing him as a liar in just that simple fashion -- i.e., he didn't complain about any violations or expose any wrong-doing in this email.

As soon as I read it, I realized "where he was going with this" as that he was in the "meta" mode of all the hacker anarchists and technolibertarians, trying to play "gotcha" with literalisms to entrap his superior into saying that "yes, executive orders are supposed to be equal to federal statutes, therefore, gosh, I guess the president went AWOL there on some national security directive."

That's what it was really all about -- and in his megalomania, he imagines he's doing heroic legal work and establishing that authority has run amok and the Rule of Law Must be Restored. Except...he doesn't really believe in the rule of law or he would use proper procedures and also not harm national security.

As you can see from not only this post, but my time-line filling up with heckling idiots, hackers love to get away with hacking and then try to get it blessed as "not" hacking. They want to be the ones to define the word, and they insist it means what they say it does.

In that, they're like Humpty Dumpty and the Red Queen and some of the other Alice-in-Wonderland characters. Remember this?

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.""The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things.""The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."Through the Looking Glass.

or

“There is no use trying, said Alice; one can't believe impossible things. I dare say you haven't had much practice, said the Queen. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

or

"The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday — but never jam to-day.""It must come sometimes to "jam to-day,"' Alice objected."No, it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every other day: to-day isn't any other day, you know."

In each one of these examples, language and meaning are being perverted -- the rule of law -- and some arbitrary pernicious misrule and chaos is put in its place -- arbitrary tyranny. That is what Snowden wants -- he and his friends decide what words mean.

Hackers inhabit this world of perversion of language naturally and almost obliviously. At some level, they do know what they are doing is wrong -- you can see that implied when they brag about their exploits which they admit are exploits -- but they are always trying to get away with murder.

Snowden is the quintessential case of this. He keeps trying to speak things into being just by lowering his voice and taking on a knowier-than-thou attitude -- in that swaggering macho tone of the slight, thin nerd boy so well captured by a Second Life blogger who said early about Snowden -- "He probably deliberately lowers his voice because he thinks it impresses women."

He never went through the proper whistleblowing channels, and what he's doing now is prevaricating -- pretending that some literalist email he sent trying to play gotcha with some NSA instructor over the levels of legal authority in the US -- is "whistleblowing". He pretends merely by invoking and referencing this meta concept that he has "done what is right".

I predicted that within hours of Snowden getting punked with this NSA revelation, Marcy Wheeler would appear -- like the Red Queen or Humpty Dumpty -- and claim that the thing meant what she meant it did. Sure enough, she did.

Marcy is the most famous concern troll of the blogosphere. As a lefty, she really could care less if a CIA agent's name was revealed. The "progressives" and left are the LAST people to care about how well intelligence agencies do!

In fact, if it were up to her, if a CIA person's name was revealed in some war zone, she'd be glad because she'd say the US was illegitimate and the war was unlawful and therefore the "higher law" prevailed. She has no basic concern for protecting the CIA, which she scorns.

But WHEN she can turn a CIA name leakage into a club to beat liberals or conservatives not of her political camp, why, then she suddenly becomes gravely concerned about what it means to have revealed Valerie Plame's name. Suddenly, it's of world-historical importance because she needs to show that the people she hates are *like the thing they hate*. (Saul Alinsky method -- and before him, Leninist method) They are the real ones to care about the CIA and worry about leaking -- they are for the security state and she is not.

So if she can catch them out in leaking the name, why, she's undermined their credibility. This legalistic gotcha is what it's all about, and it gets dull and annoying quickly because it's not a substitute for insight or analysis.

Marcy, who isn't a lawyer and has a Ph.D. in literature with a focus on the feilleton, then spent years flogging the Plame story -- and similar stories -- although as we know from her celebration of Snowden and her failure to condemn Jacob Appelbaum's threats to reveal agents, she cares not one whit about exposure of intelligence services. That's why all this is so fake.

So not surprisingly, like the Guardian and Kevin Gosztola at Firedog, she has a "legal analysis" as to why Snowden's seemingly mundane quiz question -- pretending to be a suck-up student while really attempting to create a gotcha paper trial -- is actually "whistleblowing."

As I point out, these issues she thinks constitute legal violations have never been found as such by a court of law, to my knowledge.

Maybe they will be, but they haven't been. Separation of powers and the rule of law matter, and of course if the government violates our own laws and sanctions torture, you want the policy to change, the legal interpretations that sanctioned this to be repudiated, and those responsible punished.

Except, Marcy is stuck in third gear on this and has been for 20 years. She wants to kep showing that the law is always violated, the powers never separated and executive power and agencies are always evil. You wonder when the end state will come. What perfect state would arrive for her where separation and balance of powers would exist?

In fact, for a lot of people who read and retweet @emptywheel revolutionary executive power in anarchist movements is actually what they seek, nothing like a complex and fluid and dynamic separation and balance of powers. Too complex for them.

I'll say it again: Snowden, for all his fetishizing of the Constitution, and keeping it on his desk, in fact deeply scorns the Constitution.

In his book, Glenn Greenwald quotes a telling email from Snowden where he perverts the quotation from Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson said this:

Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.

Snowden said this:

Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of encryption.

That's awful. That means "code is law" for Snowden -- as it is for all in the hacker tribe -- and it means encryption -- which is a weapon -- might makes right -- is to be used in favour of having the rule of law over the government -- and frankly coders and pretentious "whistleblowers" as well who imagine that they have to do the work of the courts and Congress because they "aren't doing their jobs".

Worse, while Jefferson had in mind human nature -- which isn't perfectable -- and the need for laws to guide the individual man, Snowden is revising this to imply that the state is by nature mischievious and individual men need to have maximum encryption to hide from this ostensibly unruly state. See how perverse this gets?

Really, pay attention to this because it's vital. Encryption is force -- math used to keep law-enforcement out. That's it's actual usage by the crypto-anarcho movement. They are overthrowing man for machine here -- because encryption is self-executing code concretizing the will of the coder. When you have the Constitution, you don't have self-executing code, you have a system which provides for a constitutional court which interprets the law by a set of premises of the rule of law. The rule of law is over man.

With code, you have the rule of some men over other men, using code -- it's a very definite premise. Code is force, only; it's not law -- it's primitive sets of 0s and 1s meant to execute like a weapon, every time. That's not what the Constitution is, which is more organic and works by reason and logic, not just logic.

Again, this is hortatory. Snowden, again and again, thinks he can exhort things into being by just appearing on TV and pronouncing them. He needs to be a spy to appeal more to the Germans to get asylum, why, then he'll be a spy, even though he was really only a sysadmin. He keeps his hosts mesmerized in these cases, but people need to break the spell.

If there is some executive order that trumped a federal statute when it was supposed to be subordinate to it, then let a court decide if this is the case. I would hope this would be done lawfully and not tendentiously or in a politicized manner. But this wasn't proved yet.

And perhaps laws have to be changed, you know? Hackers are all for changing laws their way, but if you point out that maybe we need to revise the law that makes Americans who are communicating with terrorist suspects abroad as somehow exempt from surveillance due to their First Amendment rights and such, that infuriates them because they want "freedom". Here's the thing: it has to be debated, and not imposed as a fait accompli by hacking.

As a brilliant fellow noted on Twitter, Snowden stole all those documents -- whether 200,000 or 1.7 million -- a lot! -- yet he didn't take out copies of his own exonerating email? What??? That's crazy. Most people who have a beef with a company keep a "crime file" and bring it out with them when they leave.

I suspect that the reason he can't give these names is because some of those people might be accomplices.

Micah bragged that in order to get to visit Greenwald faster, he had to get around the long wait for a visa appointment -- Brazil has been in demand lately for the World Cup and conferences and tourism.

So he devised a hackery little script that scraped the site's appointment calendar form somehow, found when there was a cancellation, and then notified him so he could jump in and grab the space. Since the web site itself suggests that you can refresh the page and see if anything opened up, Micah rationalizes his hack

For those of you familiar with Bragg v. Linden, that was exactly his (failed) argument -- if the browser was "open" to his manipulations to jimmy it and force it to its $0 opening mode, then it was "lawful" because it was "presented the product to him in this way" and therefore he had the "right" to buy the land for nothing or some low amount, then flip it and re-sell it. (There was the secondary issue of whether then the company got to compensate his virtual property or not). His arguments in favour of legalizing jimmying browsers with scripts didn't fly.

Weev used the same argument with AT&T -- he jimmied AT&T's website with what he claimed was "math in the browser" but which was really a covercive, rapidly repeating script that savaged the site to make it turn over all its customer's emails one by one based on generation of serial numbers -- the system admitted customers who had bought products to plug in the serial number and activate the product, so Weev simply had the script generate numbers in sequences to unlawfully access the site in ways not intended by the owner -- that's "unauthorized" -- and thereby grabbed all the customers' emails, some private of famous people.

This "rape culture" logic of hackers is common -- "she was wearing a short skirt so I get to rape her". Some of these nerds now have been trained enough to know they can't have that attitude toward women now; but they still have it toward other people's computer networks.

The argument was not accepted and Weev was sentenced. The only reason he is out is because a separate issue of venue which is going to be appealed and likely he'll go back in.

This "if I can do it it must be legal" -- is exactly the sort of bullshit warped thinking that hackers always try to put over us - it's hacking meaning and language first, before it hacks law. So I challenge it.

Yes, it's a hack, and not "legal" as Mashable self-servingly claims because it is using the site in ways that were not intended by the owner of the site.

Dear Sir or Madame,

Perhaps you have seen this article that makes a disturbing claim about unauthorized access to your website in order to get ahead of the long lines for a visa appointment:

http://mashable.com/2014/05/27/micah-lee-greenwald-snowden/

Here is the relevant excerpt:

"Once hired, Lee needed to travel to Brazil immediately. First Look has an office in New York City, but Greenwald works from his house located in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.

Unfortunately, the consulate in San Francisco near where Lee lives didn't have an open spot for a visa appointment. It would be at least two months before he'd be able to leave for Brazil.

Undeterred, Lee created a smart (and legal) hack — a script that constantly scraped the consulate's visa calendar to check for cancellations. If it found any, it would text Lee, giving him the opportunity to hop online and book.

In less than 48 hours, he scored an appointment and flew to Rio within days"

I would appreciate getting an answer from you on this matter.

On your website, you state:

http://saofrancisco.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us/News.xml

"Another way of trying to schedule your appontiment on an earlier date is by accessing the online appointment system every night, because there are people who cancel their appointments and their respective slots become vacant. This is a continuous process and if you keep trying you may find available slots earlier in time."

However, it does not say that people can devise scripts and coercively access your site repeatedly and rapidly over time in order to game the system and jump ahead of the queue. That isn't fair or lawful.

Therefore, I would appreciate hearing your position on the question of the actual legality of this hack used on your site -- and it is a hack because it is using it in an unintended way.

I've been dogging this point for an entire year, pointing out that Greenwald and the Snowdenistas never, ever name names of specific people -- specific victims of this "massive surveillance" they claim is going on. It's always a hysterical hypothetical. That really undermines their credibility. And they know that.

No, LOVEINT doesn't count, as that is an aberration, a job discipline issue, not a systemic issue. And no, extremist Muslims monitored for their porn habits is not the "individuals" smoking gun, either, because their Islamism created the need to monitor them and there is no evidence their rights are violated if efforts are made to neutralize their influence in this fashion. Better that than a terrorist attack.

Bring the suit if you think you've got it, good luck. And anecdotal stories about Doctors without Borders or Human Rights Watch being monitored in the field utterly fail to move me: these groups consciously, deliberately deal with armed movements, terrorists, Al Qaeda, you name it, for the sake of their humanitarian work or human rights monitoring goals, and therefore they have to accept that they will be monitored along with the terrorists whose rights they are concerned about.

HRW is particularly arrogant in this regard just like Snowden, thinking they are above the morality of the common man and can form coalitions and collaborations because of the ostensibly higher issue of documenting torture. That they could do this and still condemn the violations of rights terrorists themselves commit never seems to occur to them.

So that doesn't count. Nor does the complaining of a law firm doing business with an authoritarian country with a terrorist problem like Indonesia. Sorry, no go.

The ACLU knows this, because when I challenged their representative at a panel at NYU Law School last year, they conceded it -- and bemoaned the lack of individual victims that would help "personalize" the Snowden case and "build the movement". Sigh.

They worry that the American people aren't upset enough about Snowden's revelations because there isn't any Martin Luther King, Jr. who has been spied on...like COINTELPRO.

But this isn't a movement that cares about individuals. Like the communists, the anarcho-hackers only care about the masses, the crowds, the hypothetical, not the real person. Supposedly Manning was "converted" to join "the movement" by seeing Iraqis unfairly imprisoned, and yet, he never saw to it that those documents got leaked via WikiLeaks; Assange dismissed them as unimportant (!).

Maybe because they wouldn't show what he claimed, i.e. maybe they had used or advocated violence and weren't the innocents believed. We can't know until we see them. Snowden was the same way -- never any care for any individual except that one story about "the hacker's girlfriend" who is probably somebody like Quinn Norton or a friend of Jacob Appelbaum's who was rightly examined by the authorities. Let's have the name, and let the public judge!

My guess is that Greenwald will leak the names of people already in their inner circle -- the Snowdenistas themselves. They've been trying to make themselves victims the whole time - and it doesn't fly because whereas once they'd be questioned at borders, and even pretended they couldn't come home again, when it came to a prestigious journalism award that will help them keep their cover as "journalists" and not activists and bloggers, they were willing to come back. And they weren't questioned. Whoops, no victimhood.

Then they weren't questioned. Probably because they are already followed. Good! They should be. Anyone helping Snowden should be a subject of investigation and this won't prove any wrong-doing for me. not at all.

If Jacob Appelbaum, for example, is on the list of persons under surveillance by the NSA, I can only approve. People who threaten to reveal the names of agents; people who have already leaked a catalogue spy gadgets used to spy on enemies and keep them in check -- such persons SHOULD be under surveillance, and how! The NSA wouldn't be doing its job otherwise. If the point is that only the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security should do this job of investigating American suspects, I could say, sure, except...Appelbaum has readily collaborated with Germans -- and Russians! -- in WikiLeaks, not to mention the Australian Assange and the Brit Sarah Harrison, so he's a legitimate target of foreign surveillance because he's in touch with foreigners undermining security. The list goes on through their entire inner circle.

Micah Lee, a college drop-out and hacker who helps Greenwald manage and hide the Snowden trove should be interrogated. He is an accomplice, not to journalism but to espionage.

And the lines that Greenwald would draw more broadly away from criminal prosecution aren't trustworthy, either. Michael Kinsley is absolutely right to question whether journalists should be this special class of people who get to determine national security for us undemocratically, arrogantly, and dangerously. They shouldn't. Nor should hackers.

But wait, what if the names on Greenwald's list were my fellow church members, merely working on immigration for Latin Americans? Or what if they were my fellow human rights colleagues, merely critical of Guantanamo? I wouldn't want them to be targeted by NSA surveillance, would I?

Possibly not, but given how, over the years, I have seen people like this, seemingly such innocent church ladies, helping the murderous Communist Party of El Salvador through its front groups, or the murderous Soviet regime even directly, or given how I've seen them gloss over and dismiss some of the very real problems of terrorists let out from Gitmo who commit terrorism -- I'd have to say, sorry, but live by the sword, die by the sword, so to speak. Justify violence and help those who are violent because of some other goal (liberation theology or revolutionary or socialism or whatever), then face the fact that you will be under surveillance. Whining doesn't cut it for me.

But wait. What if my name is on the list? Won't I care then? After all, I've been critical of the US prostration before Central Asian tyrants over the NDN; I've been critical of the war in Iraq and the Obama Administration's disgraceful Russian "reset". Shouldn't I be on the watch list?

Well, I'm fine if I am on the list, and if part of watching the terrorist organization, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, means watching some of their offshoots and fronts that I might have written about or even met -- watch away, NSA, do your job.

It's at this point the Internet warrior usually tells you snottily, "Oh, you people who say you don't care if you're watched, you have nothing to hide. How would you like it if I leaked all your email online? You say you don't care if the NSA snoops."

To which I can only say:

But the NSA, unlike YOU, hackers, unlike Anonymous, doesn't leak emails on line. In fact, these gentlemen may read other people's mail; they don't dump it online like WikiLeaks or the Russians.

Here's the difference between the Kremlin and the FSB/GRU/SVR and other intelligence agencies of Russia, and our side:

When the Kremlin orders the conversations and meetings of opposition leader Alexey Navalny to be monitored, they are spilled online on TV or in the news. Giant billboards even go up to vilify him around town.

When the Kremlin monitors Victoria Nuland's conversation with the US ambassador to Kiev, it is leaked online, and harms US foreign policy and embarasses the US in its delicate relations with Ukraine -- to the Kremlin's advantage.

When the Kremlin monitors the EU's Catherine Ashton or the Estonian Foreign Minister discussing Ukraine, it goes up on Youtube and spreads like wild-fire through the old Soviet press and NGO networks that still make the left today -- and discredits Ukrainians.

Compare and contrast what happens when the NSA monitors Merkel's phone.

Crickets.

Do you know what Merkel ever said on that phone?

You don't. In fact, we can't be sure - as it is the duplicitious Appelbaum who has told us! -- that anything more than having her number in a list as a potential "watch" was the case -- and with good reason, given Germany's craven relationship with Putin.

None of these people who have been described as "watched" by the NSA, whether lovers of employers, Human Rights Watch, or Muslim extremists, has had their email leaked on line, you know, the way Gen. Petraeus email was. Oh, wait. It wasn't. Just the fact of it's penetration by the FBI was reported. Wasn't that the case?

So bring on the names -- because we know that you will either a) only be trying to advertise your own selves once again as "victims" to escape accountability; b) not have the content to go with them or c) may have it, but will be too embarassed about what the public might actually think of people fraternizing with enemies and undermining security.

So along with wondering if Edward Snowden was ever in the UK when Sarah Harrison was, I was wondering if Jacob Appelbaum was ever in Geneva when Snowden was there working as a contractor -- which seems to be 2007-2009.

He demonstrates this to me when I meet him, this past spring, two weeks before Wikileaks made headlines around the world by releasing a video showing U.S. soldiers killing civilians in Iraq. I visit him at his cavernous duplex in San Francisco. The only furniture is a black couch, a black chair and a low black table; a Guy Fawkes mask hangs on a wall in the kitchen. The floor is littered with Ziploc bags containing bundles of foreign cash: Argentine pesos, Swiss francs, Romanian lei, old Iraqi dinars bearing Saddam Hussein's face. The bag marked "Zimbabwe" contains a single $50 billion bill. Photographs, most of them taken by Appelbaum, cover the wall above his desk: punk girls in seductive poses and a portrait of his deceased father, an actor, in drag.

Well, these days, of course, you can use Euros everywhere. Why would you get Swiss francs if you weren't in Switzerland, though?

Back in 2010, when this Rolling Stone interview was made, Appelbaum says what he reiterated in Berlin last month:

"I don't want to live in a world where everyone is watched all the time," he says. "I want to be left alone as much as possible. I don't want a data trail to tell a story that isn't true."

Well, if you don't want a data trail to tell a story that isn't true, you can make truthful statements and back them up.

The fact that Appelbaum will not return to the US because he knows analysts have located him in Hawaii at the same time as Edward Snowden was in Hawaii and they find this suspicious and he thinks they will not buy his story that he was only having birthday scuba diving trips off islands. Well, I don't buy the story either, and it all comes back to this: if he could lie about Collateral Murder and claim that the soldiers could actually see children in a van and deliberately shoot children in a van -- an outrageou lie -- then he can lie about absolutely anything at all.

The Rolling Stone makes it seem -- based on his own victimology -- that he is questioned at the US border and his phone and computer confiscated for this views or his writings. Nonsense. He is questioned as a hacker who has directly supported WikiLeaks, appearing to speak in the place of Assange in July 2010 at the HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference when Assange wouldn't risk travel to New York, and has worked closely with Assange (Assange gives him co-authorship on his book). So it's not surprising that the feds want to know if he helped hack anything or move any hacked files and what he knows about the close connection to the publisher/hacker WikiLeaks to their hacker/sources.

In brief, I think it's more than likely she used the trip's ostensible purpose - to speak to human rights groups and journalists to help them with circumvention/encryption -- in fact to liaise with Snowden and coordinate various anarcho-crypto "movement" things with him -- the spinning of Glenn Greenwald's accidental leak about her own meeting with Snowden in December 2012 in Honolulu before he stole documents -- which was to come out May 21; and possibly -- big picture -- work on the take-over/compromise/control of Tor nordes in Russia -- and also discrediting of Russian Internet crypto figures not under her group's control (e.g. Durov).

All in all, mission accomplished, I think.

Let's go over it:

This trip wasn't a secret, and she even mentioned it on her Twitter timeline, but I was busy and didn't notice it until I read the Sakharov Center's news in Moscow. She was there for only two or three days, April 29-May 1, that holiday that Workers of the World love, May Day. Hide in plain sight, you know. That's always best!

Her purpose was to give the poor Russian bloggers and human rights workers now facing Internet blockage by Roskomnadzor lessons in how to use Tor and other circumvention and encryption tools like TrueCrypt. Of course, Russia is a land of Internet nerds with nothing to do but code at their no-show state jobs and surf the Internet, so there's little she can actually teach them. No matter.

It's funny that a) the Russian government let her in if her purpose was to help people defeat their censorship and b) the US authorities didn't question her at the border, given everything. She brags about this on Twitter, that no authorities have ever questioned her about her trip to meet Snowden on December 11, 2012 *after* he contacted Glenn Greenwald for the first time on December 1, 2012 (a date that has changed, but that's the one GG is now giving in his book. She just "happened" to have a vacation right at the same time!

Number of times I have been in contact with law enforcement regarding Snowden and the Honolulu CryptoParty: 0.

The Crypto Party was likely the device for Snowden's helpers at Tor -- more important than his journalists, who are just scribes, really -- to make the real-life connections they required on the ground to exchange keys and create trust and manage verifications online later.

It illustrates what a duplicitous creature she is, because we were all asking if Tor had contact with Snowden before/during the period he stole documents, and they were all denying it - but then, here it is, leaked by Greenwald himself, possibly accidently. Or maybe he wanted to burn Tor. And this story in Wired about all this has chisel marks all over it because it's been instrumented to tell the story in the most distractive, deflective possibly way, to create an alibi.

But BEFORE this story came out on May 21, there was Runa's trip to Moscow April 28-30. Why? To coordinate with Snowden because it was known the leak was coming, or perhaps the Cinncinnatus info was already seen in early review copies some journalists got of Greenwald's book. (I don't believe he intended to leak this -- John Young of Cryptome picked up the name "Cincinnatus" used with a Lavabit email address, checked the public keys, and saw this related to Snowden.)

So the trip to Moscow was likely really designed to liaise with Snowden -- and the Russian authorities didn't have a problem with that because they are all about helping the Snowdenistas, you know? So even a cover story about "defeating" their censorship works for them.

So Sandvik first sprinkles herself with the holy water of the Sakharov Center, a group of impeccable Soviet-era dissidents and their apprentices who were colleagues of Andrei Sakharov, the patron saint of the dissident movement. To be sure, lots of events are held there, and groups pay a modest fee to help support the Center, because space where people can have free discussions is increasingly hard to find.

I would love to know the visa-support organization that invited Runa and gave her her visa. No foreigner comes to Moscow without:

o an organization or agency or business authorized to provide visa support to foreigners writing a letter of invitation with its official registered seal and a number

o approval at the Foreign Ministry of that letter and that status and that foreigner

o another layer of review at the Russian Embassy abroad, and check of all the documents submitted by the foreigner.

I don't know if the Sakharov organization invited her -- I'd be sad if it did, because it's one more example of how the hackers are invading the human rights movement to try to a) radicalize it and/or b) discredit it and hijack it.

In any event, in addition to possible coordination of how the leakage of the Cincinnatus story would work, other things are possible, like:

o coordination of Snowden's continued running of Tor nodes. Who said he stopped running them? Did he turn off those ones at NSA or get others to collude with him? And even if those servers were removed from his access (we hope) he could start new ones at any time -- and the Russian government will be only too happy!

o in the interview below, you see in fact that Sandvik has trouble denying that Snowden works for Tor -- in fact, she's basically admitting he does. That has several hypotheses that may go with it:

o Snowden is working with Russian intelligence knowingly to take over Tor essentially hollowing it out from the Navy's one-time control -- and please don't tell me bullshit about how the system can't be compromised. More on that below. We already had several dozen such compromised nodes

o At one time none other than Craig Pirrong, who was wildly harassing me for months on end over my simple criticism of his implausible theses, claimed strangely that Jacob Appelbaum went to Moscow to set up those compromised servers. I continue to maintain that that a) doesn't make sense and b) has no evidence because we can't place Appelbaum there. Plus, you don't have to go there to run these servers, given all the virtualization and remote technology out there, and it seemed to obvious.

o Now that we've placed Sandvik in Moscow it's possible in fact that's what they're up to -- busy "spoiling" The Onion Router (Tor) which is what the letters stand for, although it's also a word that means "throne" or "honored seating place in the yurt" in the Eurasian languages.

o And that means this could be a collaborative effort by Wired State types both in the US government and the Russian government who think they are above it all, beyond states, The Smart People Surrounded By Idiots, and all the rest. Or some configuration thereof. People who are too clever by half, who think they are overthrowing others who may have overthrown them.

What's the net effect of this trip? Well, several hypotheses:

o to destroy faith in Tor as compromised by the US and/or Russian intelligence agencies to diminish the ability of people to use it to get around censorship

o on the contrary, to add luster to its reputation and dissipate doubters so that it can then lure lots of people in, and then they can be compromised.

Much of what Runa and her little friends do is premised on the arrogant notion that Tor is unbeatable. So they really don't think (perhaps) that the Russians or Americans can snoop on them due to "math".

So they could simply close everyone down on that basis. Or they can compromise nodes or monitor servers through various intrusive gadgets or watch the exits. There aren't that many nodes now -- it's back down to 4,000, with the number in Russia small and highly visible. So...either or both of the Russians and the Americans and anybody else interested allow Runa to wander the world of crypto parties because she is like dye or radioactive, and then lights up what she touches. Maybe all her stickers she hands out have RFIDs -- like that one on her passport yuck yuck.

Oh, except, she tore the RFID off her Norwegian passport, funny, that. Runa also has a green card or work authorization for the US which she bragged about renewing -- I was surprised she did. No quality control at DHS I guess, especially given that Crypto Party! But she says she's been in London. Why did she leave Tor? Did she figure the axe would fall there soon? She is no longer a paid employee but just one of those evangelizing volunteers. She is also among the "technical advisory committee" at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which funds Snowden and has Snowden on its board.

FFP was started by John Perry Barlow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation people. Appelbaum is also on that TAC, and still listed very robustly at Tor. Sandvik's interviews for the Russian media are important to look at, and I have them below, but first, study her timeline as its instructive as to how they are playing this whole ideological caper: First, before the trip, she drops a tweet to establish her street cred as a fighter for a free Russian internet:

VKontakte, Russia’s most popular social network, is said to be “under the complete control” of close allies of Putin: <ahref="http://t.co/cDwnlXDIeX">http://t.co/cDwnlXDIeX

But here's the thing. Runa's real attitude is one of moral equivalence -- if the US is "just like" Russia and Snowden, trapped in Putin's cage, asks the tyrant on state-controlled TV a prefabricated question, why that's "just like" a congressman in a democracy asking something of an appointed official under oversight -- sure.

That's how they play it -- make seeming criticisms of Kremlin policy, but then double back and make moral equivalence between the West and Russia, which then essentially undoes the criticism -- and then spin it around to make it really be about Western corporations. I've seen this technique used over and over again -- by Rebecca MacKinnon, by the Snowdenistas, by Soldatov and Sergei Makarov, another human rights activist (who wasted his personal meeting with Obama fretting about Snowden) and by Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks in her "leak about Syria" which was really about the West.

It gets tiresome.

Then, Runa name-checks the leading Internet and censorship guru of Russia -- who, well, still lives in Russia:

Now, on the day she travels to Moscow, this insight -- which is something about her comms there obviously, and this crypto kid is telling us this in public..why? To throw people off the scent, or something.

Turns out @twitter's two-factor authentication backup code is only good for one use. Good thing I have a backup-backup solution in place.

Oh, come now. Cafe Pushkin is right down on Tverskaya! Any smartphone would find it or just ask anybody. Oh, and now that I've noticed its salmon-coloured walls again and ornate paintings, I'm suddenly wondering if that's the location of the private dining room at the "hotel" where Snowden has met his various visitors. Surely Runa wouldn't miss a rendevous with Snowie!

Then for final good measure, she makes it appear if she's all about Internet freedom in Russia again:

Runa claims there are "a few thousand" Tor users in Russia but slon.ru says "100,000" because they've gone to check the open source statistics. Runa explained that a virus appeared that artificially increased the number of users (?!) Gosh, how does that work! And can we believe there are even a few thousand?

Tor gets grants based on proposals, and doesn't take instructions from governments, says Sandvik, when the Russian journalists at Colt.ru task her repeatedly.

"However, Tor never takes money in order to install a function which would reflect poorly on its reputation or on the security of the system." "

"But you can hardly agree with the fact that you can preserve your independence by taking money from the government," Colt persists:

Sandvik replies that by just publicizing sources, that should take care of any problem. That is, if you make cooperating with the government not a secret, then the problem goes away, see? Try telling that to Russians. She did!

Here she is, continuing to justify Tor (in reverse translation):

In fact, Tor was created by Naval Intelligence of American in order to protect the American government. But if you are the only user of Tor, then in fact you are easy to spot, because the Tor user is you. So they came to the opinion that in protecting everyone everywhere, you acquire an advantage for yourself, you create a system in which it is ipmossible to understand who this or that user is in America or Sweden. I think that is one of the reasons for the funding of Tor. Moroever, in the last few years, the purpse [of the American authorities] was to help users of the Internet in Iran.

Slon asks whether in fact Tor is really invincible and whether the NSA can break it, as she had claimed in her presentation. They asked in in fact if this was Snowden's leak. Runa said yes, Snowden had leaked many documents on this issue of Tor, that the NSA had tried and failed to break Tor and there was an article on this in the Guardian.

"Would you hire Snowden for the Tor team?" asks the impish slon.ru.

"Tor accepts any anonymous contributions, so anyone could take part in it," she says coyly.

Slon.ru presses further.

"But would you hire him for the job?"

"Hire for the job...I can't comment on that. Tor has funding for people who regularly help the project and work for it. I cannot imagine that Tor Project would discriminate against anyone," she dodges again. She doesn't want to be later caught in a lie, but...

That is, if you're a fugitive felon who has committed the worst heist against US national security in history, sure, send your resume, we're an equal-opportunity employer.

Slon continues to press -- does Tor help the government on crimes, i.e. drug deals, prosecution.

"How do you work with the government in those cases? Can it ask you to provide information about users?"

Runa answers with her usual mantra, "there is no one person, no one facility that could review the system and censor what users can do or not do. And in the same way there is no way for Tor to track users."

She uses the usual distractive rhetoric to deflect legitimate concern about Tor's enabling of criminality:

"On the one hand, for now this system makes it difficult to search for criminals, but on the other hand, it helps people, activists and human rights defenders. There are people in Tor who have spent a lot of time to help victims of domestic violence and have advised them, for example, how to visit sites so their abusers can't see this.

Of course, there are pluses and minuses in this but if you imagine, that someone in Tor tracks the visits of users of this or that site, then the question is raised: who should that person be? Can some project decide, whether users throughout the whole world can or cannot do online? If Tor had that ability, then perhaps one could ask the question, should he be paid from the American or another budget for fulfilling the censor's functions. But Tor has no functions of oversight which would enable it to remain free. For example, I have no special knowledge about the work of Tor, which is inaccessible to others. There is nothing secret in it, all of its work is absolutely open, and in order to know how it works, you just have to spend some time.

Slon presses even further -- they are so much smarter than American journalists!

"You said in your lecture that there is no system to check people who work at Tor. But can you imagine that the intelligence service, for example, or someone else wants to get involved in the project. Would they also not know anything?"

Runa claims there is no way to learn anything but IP addresses that the system is using and that there is "no way to know who is using Tor to visit certain sites." She ought to read the paper of Paul Syverson et. al. -- which no Torean has never committed on. Runa explains that Tor gets requests from the US, British, Norwegian, Polish, German governments asking them to help find criminals. They "explain how Tor works" and say they can't help. She claims she doesn't know if the Russian government has made a request.

Well, look then, US, British, Norwegian, Polish and German governments: if there is a perfect encryption tool that can evade all of your intelligence and law-enforcement, that is a weapon. It's a weapon that should not be in these unscrupulous hands.

Yeah, I get how hard it is to get it out of their hands now, you know, you can always copy on the Internet. But do try to think about the ramifications, here.

She admits Heartbleed was a big blow, and they had trouble getting all the people running nodes to upgrade. She said they lost 1000 out of 5000 servers because they couldn't reach people and ensure they had the patch.

Slon even asks if the staff of Tor could be bribed, and she says "no".

So what else was accomplished in this interview? What else was her purpose?

o To discredit Pavel Durov. She mentions Telegram, his mobile encryption program, and that it was made by "a guy who fled from Russia". Here are her damning comments:

"The creators of Telegram don't say much publicly how their app works, but they offer to pay you if you find a problem in their security system. I tried to ask them about their privacy policy. They assure us that they do not provide law enforcement agencies with information, but sometimes, after all it is impossible to refuse? Only if you are prepared to go to prison for the sake of your users.

Then I asked them under what jurisdiction they work, and they did not reply. Then I looked at how you can get in connect with them -- through a press service. And for that, you must load an app which automatically loads your contact list, every number and every name in the telephone. Although for users, that could be a convenience: when the system sees that your friends are using it, it offers you to become a user. The app in fact is becoming more popular."

So the purpose of that is in part just commercial sabotage -- she doesn't want anyone competing with Tor or Whispersystems, which is the mobile encryption program of her and Jake's friend Moxie Marlingspike. She even filed a FOIA on Telegram (!) -- and when the hackers asked her if she did that with all such software (because even they thought it was odd) she indicated she had plans to.

She doesn't want somehow making encryption software who isn't under the Snowdenistas' control or the control of the Russian government, I guess. Which is it? This is all a complicated chess game. There are feints and dodges and ruses. I leave it to you to figure out.

Yes, I'd tend to agree, and have written at length about this in the past, and unlike the people denying any relationship, I'm happy to concede that most Asperger's suffererers don't commit mass murder -- and continue to debate it openly.

And no, you won't get me to write some politically-correct version of this statement not using the term "patient" or "sufferer" or "syndrome" or whatever "are, not have" or "have, not are" version you find PC today. No one would elect to become an Asperger's patient, and no, it is not "removed" from psychiatric manuals, it is simply moved to the autism section.

Well, except there are a huge number of racists out there, especially anonymous Internet racists, and they don't commit mass murder.

It must be due to violent video games and violent movies!

Yes, I think so, but then, most people who watch or play those violent things don't commit murder.

It must be due to liberal laws that make it impossible to detain for any significant amount of time -- or even at all! - violent persons who have made threats to themselves or others.

That would be my guess, but that's not one people are willing to accept or debate, and the fact is there, too, many people with mental illness who even say violent things or watch voilent movies or play violent games don't commit mass murder.

It must be due to a combination of all of some of these factors!

Yes, exactly. But which one?

The Internet debates on this are sterile, because at times like this, the Indigo Children lobby comes out in full force and tries to savage to death anybody who disagrees that their particularly reductive, fanciful Internet-bred theories of causality are an explanation of anything except their simple, closed minds.

Also the liberals try to insist that it's all about racism -- their club to beat every political opponent -- and can't listen to reason. The last big shooter was black -- what was his excuse? What does he have in common with other shooters, though? Mental illness.

So what if you made its so every psychiatrist mandated to report every patient with violent tendencies, expressions, reports from relatives, etc. was required -- just as they are with signs of child abuse -- to report it to a master registery that must be cleared before a gun sale? That would be helpful. Good luck with that. Too many people will claim it will lead to mentally ill not seeking help. That it would also lead to health innocent people from being shot to death by mentally ill people who buy guns doesn't count.

The precise combination of factors aren't known. But it's likely "American" or "male" or "white" aren't chief among them, and "mentally ill" and "access to guns" and "violent videos/movies" are more relevant.

There are ferocious lobbies of Aspies who refuse to ever look at the violence in a few of their number, despite some very obvious cases, like Adam Lanza. For months on end, we were told there was no firm diagnosis, that it wasn't relevant, that other factors were relevant -- until finally his file was released and it was harder to deny. And what really, really stood out was how hard it was for even wealthy parents to get this tyrant in their midst, about to mass-murder people, into any kind of safe place where he couldn't harm himself or others, i.e. a mental asylum. Yet that's the least factor that anyone ever wants to look at during these times, so fearful are they of losing freedoms.

The parent of the 10-year-old Aspie who is fragile, mild, withdrawn, chasing butterflies, and heavily protected and interfaced by his parents who love him and do absolutely everything for him, at their own expense, is contrasted to the parents of older teenage Aspies who are now themselves withdrawn and fragile, as their child no longer chases butterflies but joins gun forums and even collects guns and then uses them.

What really stands out for me in this hugely documented case is how hard it is to get people locked up who should absolutely be instantly locked up. Parents call the police over really alarming and horrible videos that threaten killing people, and it's not enough. You know, like jihadist videos weren't enough to lock up the Tsarnaev brothers.

Because of the First Amendment.

But you could keep the First Amendment intact if the stigma of mental illness was removed -- not by pretending that some percentage of people on the autism spectrum are *not* violent, when they are -- and not by pretending violent culture doesn't lead to mental illness, when it does. But by really paying attention and having the right, proper facilities that need not abuse civil rights to do the job that also protects the civil right of people to life and freedom from mayhem caused by crazy people with guns.

These solutions are complicated, expensive, hard to implement when screaming entitlement lobbies are thwarting progress at every inch of the way, but as more and more of these awful things happen, likely the solutions are going to come whether some like it or not.

I'd like it to be in the direction of gun control and easier non-voluntary mental illness hospitalization rather than in the direction of trying to politically condemn white males, violent movies, racism, or a host of other vaguely-defined ills that aren't fixed by the broken socialist utopia "progressives" with their fractured interest group coercion that want to impose it on us, anyway.

Why? Because while I'm all for condemning violent culture, white or black, male or female, I don't think the solution of socialism that most people think will cure this will work, any more than it did in societies like France or Russia or China where it has not worked.

05/23/2014

From the beginning, when WikiLeaks started this attention-getting tantrum of revealing the name of the fifth country not named by Glenn Greenwald at Intercept, I thought to myself, "This isn't about the country, but about some smaller entity or preson they want to get."

But what if he did mean "company," i.e. some telecom, perhaps even some Afghan-based company that the purist revolutionaries wanted to expose as a sympathizer or enabler? I was thinking that there was an American telecom company, or perhaps some kind of consulting firm funded by USAID or something.

And sure enough, it turns out to be worse than I thought.

It's not just that they've now named the country -- which many people guessed anyway and was accidently leaked by a slide anyway.

It's that they want to screw over Jared Cohen.

Why would that be?

Because Assange didn't like the way the interview Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen did with Assange turned out, because it made Assange look bad. Schmidt put it in his book.

It could be that simple. We are dealing with petty, childish, and deranged people here at WikiLeaks.

Just in case people had trouble putting together all the dots, WikiLeaks spells it out in a series of tweets:

Google Idea's director Jared Cohen was tasked with getting Afghan telcos to move towers to US bases when at DoS https://t.co/bwVvyXuMU4

The WikiLeaks cable, which may only be released now, I don't know (does anybody) or maybe was there and nobody focused on it before, identifies Jared Cohen as the State Department staffer who enthusiastically worked to get cell phone towers put in US army bases in Afghanistan to help mobile communications in general, particularly for Afghan entrepreneurs.

WikiLeaks sees this as evil, because they see it as tacitly or even complicitly helping the NSA hack into cell communications for their "nefarious purposes".

o an official appointed in a liberal democratic government -- Obama is a democratically-elected president and the most liberal we'll ever have (I didn't vote for him the second time but he is the president, and I'd rather have him than Assange run the world);

o assigned to the job of promoting modernization, innovation, i-phones and Twitter and such -- he famously asked the devs at Twitter to move their maintenance down time so that the Iranian revolution could proceed;

o trying to do good in his various incarnations and programs -- which I disagree with, but concede to him;

o now at Google, which is a legitimate public company, in a program I don't like and whose goals I disagree with, but which also has some merit and is about doing good (peace, justice, human rights, etc);

and

o the NSA tapping into communications in Afghanistan is a legitimate measure for national security, i.e. our soldiers fighting the Taliban there.

By contrast, Assange does evil. Life is about choices.

What is it about that interview that got to Assange? Well, it makes him look extreme and deranged, in the end, not rational. I'll have to go over it again, but my hunch is that this is what it's all about.

Oh, and exposing the evil of America in Afghanistan, too. Right. But of course, I don't think it's really about that. For one, anyone with sense knows that the Taliban kill most of the people in Afghanistan, and fighting them is a good thing. You can disagree about how that fight has gone but that they need exposing and fighting rather than the US needing exposing and undermining shouldn't be a question.

WikiLeaks has really lost the plot with this one, but then, they were never about transparency and accountability, least of all for themselves, but about anarchist mayhem.

So why did Greenwald hold it back and talk about "deaths"? There are deaths anyway in Afghanistan, it's still a war zone.

Likely, as much as he likely doesn't care for Cohen's more centrist brand of liberal politics and the Clintons he represents, and doesn't care for Google (although he doesn't ever criticize them), he holds back at the idea of singling out one man, one name, and putting a target right on his back, so that he can't go to these countries (he travels all over the world) where he might be in danger.

It's really sick.

Appelbaum, of course, likely had personal dealings with Jared Cohen while Cohen was at State doing "innovation," because Tor Project, funded by the State Department's Deptartment of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and the Department of Defense (yes, go look at their web site), would have been thrilled with Tor as a "circumvention" salvation that leads to that cult of connectivity I mentioned above. Jared was probably one of those people at State that Appelbaum bragged was his friend even as others wanted him to be investigated by the Department of Justice over WikiLeaks (as well he should be).

So there may be a personal vendetta going on here from Appelbaum, it requires more research.